


Prequel

by rangerhitomi



Series: Prisoners of Fate [5]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 10:45:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11758203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rangerhitomi/pseuds/rangerhitomi
Summary: Prequel scenes for Prisoners of Fate.





	Prequel

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to have a place to post scenes of Prisoners of Fate that happened before the story began. I write them sometimes and they don't end up in the main story but it always feels a bit of a waste to just delete them and tumblr is a terrible way to archive things. They probably won't end up in any particular order but I'll place the scenes in context if needed. Maybe by the end of it I'll put them in chronological order. 
> 
> The first one is from when Yuma made the decision to go to Astral Palace.

It was midmorning when Yuma woke, judging by the amount of sunlight flooding his room, and the smell of slightly burned bread filled his nose. His clammy hands were clasped tightly around his sheets.

“It was a dream,” he tried to tell himself, but his voice wavered. He knew it wasn’t. And that made him angry.

He tossed the sheets aside and climbed from his bed, fumbling with his feet for the day clothes he had left on the floor even as he made his way to a dusty chest in the corner of the room, an old, simply carved box which had once belonged to his father.

_I miscalculated, Yuma_. An understatement. Simple miscalculations didn’t get people killed.

Yuma breathed slowly through his nose and bent down to pick up the clothes his feet dragged with him across the floor. He paused halfway through the motion and straightened up again.

“Damn it,” he whispered, staring warily at the chest. “Damn it.”

It took him a few minutes to lift the heavy chest enough to pull the key from underneath it – two years ago, he had thought about having the key melted down and sold for a coin, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it – and he jammed it in the rusty keyhole.

The chest was filled with scratched armor, faded uniforms, and worn shoes; there were trinkets from the Tenjo, Arclight, and Heartland Kingdoms, accolades from the Astralite Royal family. He pushed most of it aside without a second thought.

At the bottom of the chest was a tightly wrapped cloth bundle tied off with a knotted piece of twine. Yuma pulled it from the chest and held the bundle in both hands, stomach churning. It was just a dream, he reasoned, no point in troubling himself with this…

“Yuma!”

His sister’s voice echoed down the hall, followed by footsteps. He hastily shoved the bundle back in the chest and closed the lid, straightening up just in time for his sister to push the door open. She wore a frown and an ink-stained apron as she stared him down, he trying his best to give her a sleepy smile and not a guilty one.

“Gran and I have been waiting for you to get your lazy ass out of bed for the past hour,” she said, eyes narrowed.

“Sorry, Akari.”

“I’ve been calling for you.”

“I was having a… a dream, I guess I didn’t hear…”

She shifted her jaw and headed into the hallway. Yuma followed her. “About what?”

“Um… D—Dad.” He knew as the word was leaving his lips that he should have lied, that his sister wouldn’t take it well, because they never talked about Kazuma Tsukumo in the Tsukumo household.

Sure enough, she stopped at the entry to the kitchen and cast him a scathing look, lips set in a line so thin they were in danger of vanishing into her skin.

“When you do that, you look like a Barian,” he said in a halfhearted attempt to ease the mood.

“What kind of _dream_ would involve _him_?” she demanded, ignoring his jest.

“It’s not a big deal,” he mumbled, staring at the floor as he passed her and took a seat at the table next to their grandmother. “I dream about him and… and Mom all the time.”

Akari _tsk_ ed and made a huffing sound through her nose as she took a seat opposite him.

“What are you going to do today, dear?” his grandmother asked, passing him the apple jam.

He busied himself with spreading the jam over the burned bread as he thought about the best way to approach the subject. “Thought I might go to… the palace.”

Akari’s knife clattered to the table.  “Why?”

Yuma didn’t have a response so he mumbled something indistinct and shoved half the bread into his mouth to buy time. By the time he finished chewing and swallowing—a deliberately slow process—he thought his sister might have been inclined to drop the subject, but she glared at him so intently he was afraid he might catch fire. He settled on the first somewhat reasonable response he could think of. “To see… Kotori…”

“Oh, is that all?” Akari’s tempter flared; she was half-standing now, leaning over the table. “You were just talking about how you dreamed of our father and then suddenly you’re interested in going to the palace?”

“I haven’t seen her in three years,” Yuma shot back.

“She’s probably too busy Healing the soldiers who made the stupid mistake of joining an army in the first place!”

“Akari,” their grandmother said sharply, and Akari lowered herself back in her chair and started ripping chunks of bread off her slice.

Yuma clenched the side of the table so tightly his knuckles turned white. This was the third time they had this fight since their mother died, and both times previous ended with them not talking for two weeks until their grandmother forced them to apologize. But Yuma knew this fight was going to end differently and if he got the truth out of the way, maybe it wouldn’t end so badly.

“He told me… the gods wanted me to go.”

Akari threw her knife on the floor, the tip scraping the soft wood. “ _Fuck_ what the gods _want_ , Yuma!”

“ _Akari!_ ”

“No! No, I’m sick of this!” She shoved her chair back. It fell over. “First it was Dad, then Mom, now they want you? When will they be done with my family!?”

Yuma stood, matching her height. He ignored his grandmother tugging on the sleeve of the nightclothes he had forgotten to change out of. “We’re in a period of peace, Akari!”

“Tell that to the Dragoons!”

“That was eight years ago!”

“Also during a time of _peace_! And in case you hadn’t noticed, Dad was killed during a time of _peace_ , too!”

“Stop it, _both of you_!” Their grandmother had climbed to her feet, nearly a foot shorter than either of them. Tears streamed down her weathered face. “Neither of them would want you to fight.”

“Neither of them are here to say so,” Akari said in a quivering voice, “because our father decided that taking up a sword was more important than taking care of his family.”

Yuma shoved his chair out of the way and cleared the kitchen in three strides, heading toward his room. Akari didn’t move to stop him; months later, he might wonder what would have happened if she had tried, but blood pounded in his ears as he threw himself at floor in front of his father’s chest and opened it once more.

_You were born for great things. You were born to serve others._

His fingers were steady as they picked up the cloth bundle.

_Why would a farmer need to learn the sword, Dad?_

_Someday you might need to protect the ones you love, Yuma._

He set the bundle on his bed and stripped out of his nightclothes, rummaging around on the floor for the cleanest work clothes he owned.

“If you go,” said a voice from his door, “I will never speak to you again.”

He ignored her as he fastened his belt and shoved his feet into his boots.

“You’ll get yourself killed, just like him, and it’ll be your own damn fault.” Akari moved aside to let him out of the room. “But don’t expect me to cry over your body.”

He paused at the door, hands wrapped around his father’s sword, still tightly bundled. “I hope someday you’ll be proud of me.”

He couldn’t face his grandmother. He might have changed his mind if he had. So he passed the kitchen and left through the front door without another glance back.


End file.
